5 customer experience stories you shouldn’t miss this week

This week’s digest of customer experience stories that may have passed you by demonstrates that chatter around Big Data is not going to die down anytime soon. Here are the five headlines that you might have missed:

Where predictive analytics is having the biggest impact
“The big data revolution is upon us.” While that’s not exactly cutting-edge news, Harvard Business Review’s outlay of the ground being broken by predictive analytics is a really interesting read. It covers predicting demand in the consumer space, improving pricing, predictive maintenance and radically new applications in healthcare. If you’ve ever felt like you need to understand the lay of the predictive land, this is as good a place as any to start. Read it here.

The omnichannel customer experience is poised to take off in regulated industries
Doctors, bankers and government representatives are set to enter the omnichannel fray. More informed, empowered and connected than the average consumer or business, a move towards omnichannel models in healthcare, financial services and government, while still remaining in compliance could bring about individual-level personalization in industries that really need it. Read the full article on TechCrunch here.

Data-driven customer experience: the challenge of openness
Forbes has come to the conclusion that the benefits of evolving to data-driven customer experiences are wide-ranging, including enhancing revenue generation, enabling cost reduction, as well as accelerating process efficiencies and quality improvements. And we wholeheartedly agree. In this article, they explain the barriers that companies need to get over in order to progress. It’s all laid out here.

TV, ISPs deliver the worst customer service
Bad news for TV & Internet service provides as they rank last in this year’s US-based Tempkin Experience Rankings. At the other end of the scale, supermarkets, fast food chains, retailers and parcel delivery services took the top spots. Read more on ArsTechnica here.

There is no such thing as ‘public data’
An op-ed on Slate explains that it’s not OK for researchers to scrape information from websites like OKCupid. From the article: “The collection, use, and disclosure of our personal information has too often been justified under the auspices of its publicness with little or no scrutiny. The ‘public information’ justification is a simple way to avoid answering hard questions about the privacy interests in data. You can call data revolutionary. You can call it ‘big,’ and you can call it ‘open.’ But if you call it ‘public,’ you better be able to back it up.” Read it here.